Homebrew officially supports Apple M1, giving programmers another reason to switch to a new Mac

Xiaocha from Aofei Temple
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Is the lack of Homebrew support one of the biggest reasons preventing you from switching to a Mac with an M1 chip?

Good news: Today, Homebrew officially released version 3.0.0, which officially supports Apple Silicon's M1 chip. Now you can confidently upgrade to a new Mac.

In the past, new versions of Mac needed to be manually compiled and installed using Homebrew, but now it can be installed with just one command, just like Intel versions of Mac:

$ /bin/bash -c “$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)”

Macs equipped with M1 chips will install Homebrew in the /opt/homebrew folder, which is slightly different from Intel-based Macs.

However, just because Homebrew supports M1 doesn't mean that M1 also supports every package under Homebrew. To see if the package you need is supported, go to the formulae.brew.sh page to search.

For example, the first item a2ps, when you click it and see the Apple Silicon column, it means that this software supports M1.

Currently, most software packages have completed support for M1, so there is no need to worry too much.

If you do encounter unsupported software, don't worry. Users can still run Rosetta 2 in Terminal to translate Intel x86_64 software into a format that supports M1.

The method is very simple, just add arch -x86_64 before the Homebrew installation command:

$ arch -x86_64 /bin/bash -c “$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)”

Software installed by Rosetta 2 is no longer in /opt/homebrew, but in the /usr/local/bin folder.

Since the native Homebrew is installed first, if you want to install the package with the Rosetta 2 translation, it is best to use the absolute path of the command:

$ /usr/local/bin/brew install -s <package>

In addition to supporting the M1 chip, Homebrew 3.0.0 also provides the following updates:

• brew bottle and bottle do blocks use a new syntax. Using brew style --fix will automatically fix formulae to this new format.

• The new HOMEBREW_BOOTSNAP environment variable allows the use of the Bootsnap gem to speed up repeated brew calls. However, it is not currently supported on Apple Silicon.

• Many original commands have been disabled and deleted, such as release-notes.

• A new command, brew completions, has been added, which allows you to choose to accept completion functions provided by third-party taps.
  

Finally, the Homebrew team expressed special thanks to the Apple team for funding this update, providing Apple Silicon hardware, and having engineers involved to help complete this work.

It has to be said that Apple has worked very hard to build the software ecosystem for M1.

Official website:
https://brew.sh/2021/02/05/homebrew-3.0.0/